Every Interaction I've Ever Had with Police

this fucker

 

Presented in no discernible order. I did not include anything from my year working for the police as a dispatcher, or anything from social interactions with family members or friends who are police.

• Cops showed up at a moderately-sized party I threw in December 2007 at my parents' house while they were out. The cops stated that everyone who did not drink should get in line, and they breathalyzed all those people (who were then told to exit the premises posthaste). Everyone else was to remain at the home. The police said that anyone seen leaving the house from this point forward would be arrested. They gave me a $300 fine for disorderly conduct. Pretty much as soon as the cops left, everyone scattered.
  
  
• I got an underage drinking charge in January 2008 at another party in Rockledge (not my house this time). The police had apparently already been there that week for another party, and walked in all like "not again, [host]." I blew a 0.03, which was enough for a charge due to my age. I had to attend alcohol classes in Abington for the charges to drop from an underage to a simple misdemeanor fine.
  
  
• I received an underage drinking citation at Burholme, but you already know that story. The charges were dropped after 40 hours of volunteer work, mostly because the daughter of a police captain was also "arrested" with me.
  
  
• Harry and I were walking along the train tracks that cut across Oxford Ave. and eventually act as the border between Philly and Cheltenham. We were taking this route mostly because it was the shortest route from my house to Cindy's house. An undercover cop stopped us by saying "Where's the keg at, boys?" The cop stated that she had information about a keg happening on the tracks. We were not headed to a kegger. She took our information, but had no reason to keep us.
  
  
• Harry and I were setting off fireworks (nothing too egregious) in North Wildwood, on the path that runs parallel to the beach. After the last firework had been lit, a cop pulled up, stating that there were multiple reports of fireworks being set off, and that was illegal. Harry and I told him that it was "not us," pulling out our pocket linings to show only lint. Fortuitous timing. The officer took our information, but had no reason to keep us.
  
  
• Harry and I were out past curfew in Rockledge. We had snuck out of my parents' house, and walked all the way to Cheltenham Village, where Mary was hanging out while her parents were out of town. I might have had one beer, but definitely nothing crazy. The thrill was more of the sneaking out in the middle of the night than any other malicious activity. Anyways, it was like five in the morning, and we had made our way back to Rockledge. I didn't want to jump back in the window and scare the shit out of my aunt (who was up already for work), so we sat out front, waiting for her to leave. A cop happened to drive by, and slammed the breaks when he saw us. He made me call my parents, who came out front to collect us. He also claimed that he saw us earlier that evening trying to get into the Rockledge Pub, which was not true. He took our information, but had no reason to keep us.
  
  
• I was speeding as we crossed the border from Arizona to New Mexico. NM uses aerial radar guns, so I was tracked down pretty easily by highway police. Given a ticket, paid a fine via mail.
  
  
• My buddy Mike C. was speeding down 309 while I was riding passenger. Same deal—ticket, fine, a 20-minute ordeal.
  
  
• I got a flat tire one time riding down Oxford Ave. and popped a tire after hitting a particularly nasty pothole (I pulled over about 30 feet from the spot where Harry and I got accosted by police on the train tracks). It was my parents' car; my dad drove down in their other car to help me change the tire. A policeman pulled up behind us to see what the matter was, and drove off when my dad started complaining about the pothole.
  
  
• Further north on Oxford Ave., and maybe a couple years later, me and Mike (see the Mike from two bullet points ago) and Kyle were on a clandestine 2 AM drunken mission to steal one of those signs hung on all the telephones in the area that said "WELCOME TO FOX CHASE / ROCKLEDGE" so that we could hang it in our dorm room. We duct-taped an open pocketknife to a hockey stick, and planned on using that to try to cut it down. We neared Hunan Wok, but saw headlights down the block, so we ducked behind a dumpster. The headlights belonged to a 2nd District paddywagon. The cops pulled up and yelled: "Come out from behind there!" We emerged (sans knife-hockey-stick). The passenger seat cop asked "Were you peeing behind there?" Not wanting him to see the knife, we all nodded our heads. Then (direct quote): "You're lucky we have bigger fish to fry," and they sped off.
  
  
• There was the incident with the police taking our beer that I just mentioned the other day.
  
  
• There was the incident with those wily teenagers snatching my cell phone, but I already wrote too much about that.
  
  
• In college, I participated in a scavenger hunt. One of the items on the list was "picture in a jail cell." The Rockledge police allowed the picture to be taken (complete with one of my teammates being "handcuffed.")
  
  
• Me and Drew walked to a beer distributor in Manayunk after we ran out of beer back at the Bike Race party. An undercover cop was in front of the store, and asked for our IDs when we emerged with cases of Miller Lite in hand. He radioed in the info (took a few minutes longer since Drew is from New England), and since there was no reason to keep us, he let us get back to our party.
  
  
• One time, I was assigned to an investigation regarding a large family whose children were truant (i.e. not going to school regularly). After not finding the family home during my initial attempt, I left a letter with my phone number. The patriarch later called me and told me that if I showed up to his house again, he would "put me six feet under the ground." Of course, I had to go back to his house, this wasn't optional. According to the rules of my workplace, I was required to call the police for backup the next time I went to the house. I called 911 when I was around the corner, and told the dispatcher that it wasn't an emergency. I guess the dispatcher didn't note this, because three cops cars showed up with lights and sirens, and were visibly annoyed with me when I knocked on the door and no one was home.
  
  
• Willow hit the panic button on our ADT security system, and a couple cops showed up to make sure that everything was alright. I held Willow out to wordlessly explain what happened.
  
  
• There were multiple fraternity and sorority and sports team parties at La Salle that I was attending when the cops showed up. For the most part, they would just kick everyone out (everyone who didn't live there, anyway).
  
  
• When I lived off campus my senior year, we had a few parties (ha). At one party (if my memory serves me right, this was Family Weekend), a police officer (a captain, we later found out) walked into the living room without knocking. Without saying a word, he flipped the coffee table. Then, he walked into the dining room and flipped the dining room table, breaking it. Even though it was my own house, I immediately exited, and took a walk around the block. There was no fallout with any of my other roommates as far as I can remember, except for the fact that we needed a new dining room table.
  
  
• There was at least one other instance of the police showing up at a party. We kept the front door closed and the front window blinds down, so the police had no excuse to just walk into the home after that. One time, a cop was knocking on the door, so we turned off all the lights, silenced the music, and hid behind couches. The cop yelled through the mail slot: "We'll be back!" and left. The party continued.
  
  
• One time I was drinking a beer on the Broad Street Line subway, and a SEPTA cop walked into my train car. I was pretty drunk, so I don't remember specifics, but I know he said something like "I should arrest you right now." I complied with the implied directive by immediately ceasing to drink any more, and I'm pretty sure I just got off at the next platform to throw the beer out.
  
  
• I was at Harry's bachelor party (me and Harry are cop magnets I guess) in North Wildwood, and I was so drunk that I peed on the porta potty instead of in the porta potty. Two beach cops saw me doing this, and immediately gave me a citation for public urination. One of the cops told me "thanks for being so cool about this," since I didn't do anything but stand there and shut the fuck up while they were writing the ticket.
  
  
• One time, my sister had a party at my parents' house with all her friends (I recall witnessing an entire refrigerator stacked with Hurricane forties). I had gotten pretty drunk the night before, so I had a sober night at Cindy's house (while her parents were out), and then came home and went to bed, while sis's party was still raging. Next thing I know, it's two in the morning, and there's a loud banging on my bedroom door: "Get out of there!!" It's the police. I emerge in my pajamas, stating that I was sleeping. The cops don't believe me; they think I was hiding from them. I was corralled with the rest of the kids who couldn't hop a fence fast enough, and everyone was breathalyzed. I blew a 0.00, and the cop says, "Okay, I guess you really were sleeping." Everyone who blew above a 0.01 was given an underage drinking charge. The cops scoured the house, and took all the beer they found, including a full case of Miller High Life that I had stashed in the garage for a trip down the shore. I was told "If this is your parents' beer, they can come pick it up at the station." My dad went to the police station and got the beer back.
  
  
• My parents had their own party at their house for once, and I was there, 20 years old, getting drunk because it was okay to do that at family parties by that point. I was still scared of the Rockledge police coming to the party and giving me another underage, however (see: every other bullet point on this list, pretty much). So when they eventually did show up to address noise complaints, I hid behind the shed while my mom (a borough councilwoman at the time) told that everything was okay and that they'd turn the music down a little.
  

I have tried to present each of these scenarios with just the facts about what happened. However, you can start to infer the true meaning of such a list as the incidents begin to stack up: This is a portrait of white privilege.

 

To be clear, most of the incidents above involve me doing something illegal. There are exceptions, and I'm not saying that underage drinking is the worst crime imaginable, but there is a law, and I was breaking it. And in both the short-term and the long-term, I suffered very little consequences. A few hefty but manageable fines, and a few warnings, and that's about it.

 

Whether I knew it at the time or not, I was benefiting from being white while dealing with an institution that is systemically racist.

There are plenty of studies show that similar crimes can have racially disparate outcomes. This isn't a case of every single cop being racist, it's a matter of law enforcement as a whole being designed to unfairly persecute people of color. If there is a heavy police presence in a neighborhood heavily populated with minorities, then there are going to be more arrests in that area, even if minor crimes such as drug use are not higher in these areas. (It's long been a conclusion that I had so many run ins with the Rockledge police because they didn't have any black people to harass.)

You can see this in practice anecdotally when you compare this list to other incidents in other parts or the city/state/country. 18-year-old Joe K*** was able to continuously break the law by drinking alcohol, and received what amounted to a slap on the wrist; meanwhile, a 12-year-old black kid is charged with a felony for selling mix CDs at a mall. What exactly do you think the 2nd District cops meant when they told us that they had "bigger fish to fry"?

The general consensus on the right seems to be that if you don't want to be arrested, then you shouldn't do anything wrong, but I'm showing you this list to prove that it just doesn't come down to whether you are doing something "wrong" or not. I did plenty of illegal shit and I never feared great consequence. I'm white and it was a Hurricane forty. If I was black and it was a blunt, it'd be a completely different story. Maybe I'd be sentenced to the minimum five years in prison.

On top of that, I've never had an interaction with the police during which I feared for my life. I didn't have to, because that shit just doesn't happen to white people. If you could've heard how my cousin was yelling at the police when my sister's party got busted, you could easily assume that he was threatening police. The outcome? An underage drinking charge. Think about all the white guys with weapons in Fishtown, harassing passersby—the police were protecting them. But if you are a black child with a toy gun? You're getting arrested, or possibly killed.

Black people are disproportionately murdered by police every year. This is a fact. It isn't an opinion, it's a fucking fact. I have had a wide range of interactions with police, from completely innocuous (are you okay with that flat tire) to malicious (breaking tables and stealing beer with no repercussions), but I have never felt like my life was in danger. This is white privilege. It's the very fucking definition of white privilege. Because of the color of my skin, I have had less to worry about when it comes to police interactions.

If you are reading this, and you are white, and you have broken the law in a thousand tiny ways like I have, then it's time to acknowledge your own white privilege. Educate yourself, donate money, and fucking VOTE.